Jakob Fioole (1978) is a painter, currently living and working in Boston, U.S.

He grew up on a decayed farm in a suburb of Breda that he saw slowly being restored.
With the presence of all kinds of machinery and building materials, the house and garden
resembled a massive playground. The surrounding neighborhood was still in development,
so exploring the wide area around the house was also an adventure. A wasteland speckled
with alluring construction sites, buildings and houses gradually closing in on the farm.

In 1997, after high school and spending a year at a technical engineering college in
The Hague, Fioole attended art school in Breda. The first years were fully occupied by
drawing, mainly pencil on paper. Constantly challenging himself to find new ground, often
using various kinds of (physical) restraints to help explore the depth of the medium.

After moving to another art school in 's-Hertogenbosch in 1999, he started using acrylic
paint in his drawings and slowly shifted from working on paper to working on canvas.
Soon he was fascinated by the resistance found in the complexity of oil paint. and around
this time his subject matter started to gain importance as well.

While living in the U.S. (2008-2014), Fioole was fascinated and confronted by the country's
cultural make-up and urban environments, and developed a clear vision on his work:

"I like to see my work as an actual place. A city or ghost town that I am building with
paintings. Every piece reveals another part of this parallel world.I'm interested in a certainsense of absence and the manifestation of decay.It makes you wonder if something was different in another time, and how.Old photographs often share this quality too, you might question how much of what
you see is actually real. Maybe you are looking at someone else's memories.Let the ghost town be my city."